My Silver Planet by Daniel Tiffany

Author:Daniel Tiffany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Bad Infinity

In the Cantos, Pound synthesized the modalities of epic, kitsch, and avant-garde as a way of producing a utopian vision of cultural and political totality. By the mid-1930s, Pound had embraced Italian Fascism as a partial realization of this utopian vision, aligning the Cantos with Mussolini’s regime and using his poem as an eccentric tool of Fascist propaganda. With alarming fluency, Pound assimilated his most fundamental poetic beliefs, innovations, and tastes (the theory of poetic personae, Imagism, Vorticism, the ideogrammic method, paideuma) to his newfound Fascist ideology. Even after the war, when Pound expressed some regret for his delusional views—when the last quarter of the Cantos were written—he found it nearly impossible to systematically isolate the core of his poetic values from the demonologies of Fascism and anti-Semitism. The autonomous modalities of kitsch and epic had become in Pound’s poetry inalienable properties of Fascist ideology. The prospect of a modern, redemptive totality had reverted to archaic totalitarianism. On its own terms, as a poetic vision of utopia, the Cantos is a failure: it is not, as Pound claimed, “a poem containing history” but a poem containing, and consumed by, myth: by delusional, bourgeois myths—which Pound converts into neo-pagan “mysteries”—of class and racial hatred.

At the same time, the provisional motives and horizons of Pound’s failed project should not be dismissed altogether. In order to isolate the mistakes he made as a poet struggling to forge a holistic vision—and to avoid repeating them—but also to salvage some tutelary value from the wreckage of the Cantos and to gauge the reparative powers of epic and kitsch, one must establish a context for the figurative strategies and auxiliary concepts Pound used to wed his poetic values to Fascist ideology. To do so effectively, one must acknowledge and try to understand how Pound’s investment in the principles of collectivism and totality (via kitsch and epic) echo indirectly, and sometimes anticipate, certain features of the contemporaneous Marxist discourse of totality.

Pound, as I indicated earlier, began to explore the idea of epic (and totality) in his poetic program about the same time that Lukács sparked debate about these categories for Western Marxism in The Theory of the Novel (1920) and History and Class Consciousness (1923). For purely political reasons, of course, Lukács is an unlikely figure to use as an index for measuring the historical resonance of Pound’s conceptions of totality, yet the convergence of some of their views on this topic is potentially revealing in a variety of ways. Pound’s public migration towards totality and epic began somewhat earlier than Lukács’s—shortly after the eruption of Vorticism in 1914—and can be understood more precisely, at least initially, in relation to the influence of the British anarchist poet-philosopher, T. E. Hulme. One discovers in Hulme’s ideas (developed during a brief period before his death in World War I) the nucleus not only of Pound’s efforts to modernize his own poetry (via the principles of Imagism) but also of a radicalized political profile that would only become fully evident in Pound’s career when he began to gravitate towards Fascism.

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